The cutting of gears results in a burr on the end tooth edges, which must be removed for various reasons. One of the reasons is that in the subsequent work steps, an end face of the gear wheel is often used as a planar clamping and determination surface, and the burr interferes with the planarity of said surface. Furthermore, after hardening, the burr creates the risk of breaking off later, when the gearwheel runs in a transmission, thus causing damage to the tooth flanks or to components of the transmission. Furthermore, this type of burr also represents a risk of injury during the handling of the work piece wheels. It is also not sufficient to merely remove the burr because the remaining tooth edge can become glass-hard during hardening due to over-carburization, and then chip under stress.
Thus, in a known method described earlier (EP 1 270 127 A1), the tooth edge is reshaped into a chamfer in that material of the work piece wheel is displaced in the zone of the end tooth edge by a chamfering wheel meshing therewith. However, this plastic reshaping produces a secondary burr in the periphery of the tooth flank adjacent to the chamfer. Said secondary burr represents a severe problem for the subsequent hard machining, for example by honing or grinding. It leads to a premature wear and tear of the machining tool and therefore requires frequent truing processes of the machine tool used for the reworking. This is why the work piece wheel meshes with a toothed smoothing wheel in the aforementioned prior art to use second-stage pressure to smooth the secondary burr. However, this cannot achieve a completely satisfactory removal of the secondary burr.
The terms “toothed” and “toothing” used herein refer to any external or internal toothing where the meshing occurs in a rolling fashion. In particular, the toothing may be cylindrical or conical in shape.
The invention is based on the problem of providing a method and a device of the type described above, which allows an improved removal of the secondary burr.